“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” — A Most Extraordinary Book
“Not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!” -Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chapter 45
Most anyone who’s grown up in the United States has heard of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We know it was an anti-slavery novel released some time around the Civil War — wait, was it before or after? When Jeopardy asks us for the book’s author, we pat ourselves on the back if we manage to pull “Harriet Beecher Stowe!” out of our foggy recollections of 10th grade history class. And we think we know what it means when someone is called “an Uncle Tom.”
Yet all this collapses what may be the most extraordinary novel in American history into a meaningless smattering of rote vocabulary words.
This is the kind of book to which no summary can do justice. Its masterful prose immerses you in the world of powerless, brutalized slaves as the narrator solemnly reminds you at regular intervals that this is no story at all — it is the reality of the antebellum United States of America.
This book will affect you to your core and lodge itself in your bones.
Shocking the conscience
I finished the second chapter in audiobook form just as I pulled into the parking lot for a lunch meeting. I heard the narrator describe the sadistic tortures inflicted on George Harris, a slave and one of the book’s main characters. In rapid succession, George is:
- Pulled from a relatively comfortable factory job to a life of hard labor and regular floggings on his tyrannical master’s farm, for no reason other than his master’s jealousy;
- Told he must abandon the wife and child he loves and marry a new woman, on pain of being sold downriver to an even worse plantation; and
- Ordered to kill his own dog.
When George refuses this last command, he is forced to watch as his master ties a heavy rock around the dog’s neck and throws him into a pond to drown.
“Poor thing!” George says. “He looked at me so mournful, as if he wondered why I didn’t save him.”
George is then flogged for disobeying the order.
At this point I stopped the audiobook, put my face in my hands and could only utter a soft, “Holy shit.” The vividness of the horror assaulted my emotions, and a powerful mixture of rage, indignation, and sadness flooded me almost immediately.
Taking a few deep breaths, I stepped out of my car and headed into my lunch meeting. About 10 people were sitting around a large table, eating, drinking, talking, and laughing. A feeling came over me that I had only felt during past periods of mourning. I looked around the room, aghast. “How can you possibly go on with your day like that, like everything is normal?” I thought. “Don’t you know what has happened??”
Never mind that the terrible story was about a fictional character living 170 years ago, in conditions that have long since been eliminated. And never mind that a century-and-a-half of readers had already felt the same way I had upon reading Uncle Tom’s two opening vignettes. George’s poor dog had already drowned millions of times over. But to me, it was all happening for the first time, right then.
I still had 43 chapters left to read.
After finishing only those first two chapters, I understood why Uncle Tom became the second-best-selling book of the entire 19th century (behind only the Bible). It is a call to arms, making the moral wrong of slavery so obvious and so personal for the reader, and the need for immediate action so clear and compelling, that it is almost surprising that war took nine years after the book’s release to finally break out.
When paper binds stronger than chains
From these early chapters, the book goes on to recount many more heart-wrenching tales laying bare every consequence of slavery and the realities of its implementation: the brutality and deliberate crushing of the human spirit that we have seen; the corruption not only of the slave but of the master, who contorts logic and morality to justify his ownership of human property; and the slave-traders and -catchers who deal in human souls no differently than bales of cotton.
Stowe reserves particular scorn for the legal system that not only enables and defends these injustices but leaves the enslaved utterly destitute of all rights and protections. Our friend George Harris explains the general situation well, on his route to Canada seeking freedom:
“Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or any one like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don’t make them, — we don’t consent to them, — we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.”
Augustine St. Clare, a character who owns slaves yet abhors slavery, also attacks the law (emphasis added):
“For pity’s sake, for shame’s sake, because we are men born of women, and not savage beasts, many of us do not, and dare not, — we would scorn to use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands. And he who goes the furthest, and does the worst, only uses within limits the power that the law gives him.”
To be more specific, Stowe lays out the following points over the course of the book:
- Slaves have no right to testify in court, so in the absence of a friendly white witness, they are completely dependent on their masters’ good will not to commit crimes — including murder — against them or their fellow slaves.
- If a kind master dies or has to sell slaves to cover debts, the slave has no protection and no say in who his or her new master will be. (To emphasize the implications of this point, Stowe titles one chapter, “Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners.”)
- And not only this, in most cases slaves must watch in helpless despair as their children, parents, husband or wife are auctioned off, each to separate owners, never to be seen again.
- If anyone dares try to escape from bondage or, having escaped successfully, tries to rescue the rest of their family, they are deemed criminals.
In the face of these trials, despair is an ever-present emotion among the slaves in the story. A frequent refrain among young and old is, “I wish I’d never been born.” The hopelessness is so overpowering for one slave mother that she fatally poisons her own two-week-old baby with laudanum to save him from a life of misery and torture. Other characters, like George, decide that dying during a failed escape attempt would be no worse — and perhaps better — than their current situation.
“All men are created equal”
Stowe also emphasizes with bitter irony throughout the book that this is not just any legal system that allows such terrible things to happen every day, but the American legal system — the land of the free. Take this example (emphasis added):
The [boat] was floating gayly down the stream, under a brilliant sky, the stripes and stars of free America waving and fluttering over head; the guards crowded with well-dressed ladies and gentlemen walking and enjoying the delightful day. All was full of life, buoyant and rejoicing; — all but Haley’s [slave] gang, who were stored, with other freight, on the lower deck.
George Harris makes the simple and obvious point that by maintaining slavery, America is denying and making a mockery of its founding creed:
“Haven’t I heard your Fourth-of-July speeches? Don’t you tell us all, once a year, that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed? Can’t a fellow think, that hears such things? Can’t he put this and that together, and see what it comes to?”
As natural as this argument sounds to us now, it was not always universally accepted. Elsewhere, Stowe shows us the reaction of many Americans of the time to such ideas (emphasis added):
“…the first verse of a republican’s catechism, ‘All men are born free and equal!’”
“Poh!” said Alfred; “one of Tom Jefferson’s pieces of French sentiment and humbug. It’s perfectly ridiculous to have that going the rounds among us, to this day. … we can see plainly enough that all men are not born free, nor born equal; they are born anything else.”
And toward the end of the book, Stowe connects the plight of the slave directly to the founding story of America:
Liberty …— electric word! … Why, men and women of America, does your heart’s blood thrill at that word, for which your fathers bled, and your braver mothers were willing that their noblest and best should die?
Is there anything in it glorious and dear for a nation, that is not also glorious and dear for a man? What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it? … To your fathers, freedom was the right of a nation to be a nation. To [George Harris], it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute.
With these words and this theme throughout the book, Stowe challenges America to live up to its own professed ideals. We must choose, she tells us, between honoring the values upon which America was founded, or supporting slavery. We cannot have both.
Future leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr., would use this same rhetorical strategy.
Southern guilt and Northern complicity
The book easily could have taken the angle of attacking the South for continuing with slavery while lionizing the North for fighting against it. Yet Stowe does no such thing. Instead she attacks all sides, from the obviously guilty South to the less-obvious-but-still-guilty North — from those with blood dripping off their knuckles to the white-handkerchief class that benefits more indirectly.
She criticizes, on the one hand, the Southern ministers who cherry-pick verses from the Bible to support their slaveholding constituents, and on the other hand, the Northerners who fiercely advocate for the abolition of slavery yet would scorn to see free blacks in their own cities, preferring instead that they be sent back to Africa.
Stowe speaks often of the complicity with which the genteel allow slavery to persist. She describes the lending houses in New York that sell debtors’ slaves without a second thought when necessary to recover monies owed. And she castigates the Northern politicians who consent to the further expansion of slavery across the continent, or who allow legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act to pass. That law, which sought to punish anyone in any state who assisted runaway slaves, in fact prompted Stowe to write the book in the first place; she published its first installment less than nine months after the Act’s passage. One sees much of her in the minor character of the Senator’s wife in Chapter 9.
In some scenes, however, Stowe does insert extra jabs at the South in the form of dry and sarcastic remarks from anti-slavery characters. For instance, after a slaveholder in a tavern complains of his slaves always resisting his authority, another patron remarks, “Better send orders up to the Lord, to make you a set, and leave out their souls entirely.” (From Chapter 11, “In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind.”)
The unknown hero
There are many other facets of the story that deserve attention, from the critical role of women in the plot to the psychological analysis of the Southern slaveholder. The moral teachings of Christianity, as embodied in the characters of Uncle Tom and Evangeline (“Eva”) St. Clare, play a major role in the book — such a large role, in fact, that discussion of it merits an entire, separate article. But for the sake of brevity, here let us finish the overview of the book by returning to where we began: with George Harris.
Though George is not the book’s title character and he is accordingly much less well known than Uncle Tom, I found him to be the more compelling protagonist of the story. Unlike Tom, George is unwilling to passively raft down the river of fate and simply trust in God to protect him. Instead, he takes his destiny into his own hands. Determined to escape his despotic master or die trying, he succeeds through an extremely bold gambit: he dyes his hair, uses a form of make-up on his skin to give himself a “Spanish complexion,” acquires clothes to match, and then rides through the countryside in broad daylight with a fellow slave whom he passes off as his own. Though he still must overcome many difficulties and dangers, the bet works: George successfully reconnects with his wife and son, and they eventually find their freedom on the shores of Ontario, Canada.
Uncle Tom, by contrast, consciously chooses the path of martyrdom over freedom. He routinely aids others in distress but declines to advocate for himself, passing up multiple opportunities to escape over the course of the story. Yet despite his piety, empathy and generosity, he never sees his family again after he is sold to a slave trader, and he ends up being murdered by his final master. My follow-up article to this review contains much more about Tom and the book’s Christian themes:
George not only succeeds in obtaining his hard-earned liberty, he goes even further. As we have seen, he does not consider the United States to be “his” country. Yet he decides not to adopt Canada as his own either. In the book’s epilogue, a letter from George describes his decision to go with his family to France to receive a college education. And then? To Liberia, to build a free, African republic. A prosperous Liberia, he believes, could advocate on the world stage for oppressed blacks everywhere, especially those in the United States:
In the great congress of nations, we will make our appeal, and present the cause of our enslaved and suffering race; and it cannot be that free, enlightened America will not then desire to wipe from her escutcheon that bar sinister which disgraces her among nations, and is as truly a curse to her as to the enslaved.
Though Stowe herself earlier in the book criticizes Northerners who advocate for the emigration of American blacks to Liberia, this is nonetheless a brilliant conclusion. George Harris embodies the ideal of the Horacio Alger “self-made man,” demonstrating ingenuity, courage, persistence, and a willingness for hard work. Yet with bitter irony, he can only achieve his American dream by forcefully departing the land of the free.
Stowe’s point here reinforces an earlier theme: America’s professed core values are hollow, meaningless, and hypocritical while slavery continues to exist on her shores. Additionally, slavery either destroys (as with Uncle Tom) or drives away (as with George) some of the best human beings the country has to offer. How many more souls do we continue to lose, needlessly, every day?
So why haven’t I read it?
Asking around among friends and family, I didn’t come across anyone who had actually read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though all were at least somewhat familiar with it. No one had read it in school. This is likely because of:
- The book’s liberal use of the n-word, which in recent years has become more taboo than ever, even in academic conversations.
- Frequent invocations of racist stereotypes and sweeping generalities about the “African” and “Anglo-Saxon” races in the book.
- Ubiquitous Christian themes and motifs, to the extent that reading the book in school could raise questions about state endorsement of religion.
Though these characteristics do make any discussions about the book necessarily more delicate, excluding the book entirely due to these concerns is, in my view, a mistake and a loss for students. The book should be recognized as a product of its time and analyzed and discussed as such. Its historical value is immense, not only for the unflinching portrait of antebellum America revealed in its pages but also for the fact that it did a great deal to turn the tide of public opinion in the North firmly against slavery. On top of this, its literary quality is exceptional.
When it was first published, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a call to arms for the elimination of a specific evil. Yet it remains relevant today, long after it achieved its original goal. It is an evergreen reminder that we in America must never shrink from living up to our own ideals.
Especially now amidst the ongoing conversations about race in the United States, every American, of any background, would benefit from reading this extraordinary book — even if it does leave them a little shaken.
That includes you.
Final score: 10/10
Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for free on Project Gutenberg, or for $0.99 in many editions on Amazon.
